Drew's Best Buddy

Zhang Li, The Guy Who Is Always At Our House.

From a relatively poor rural family, he's a second-year electronic communications master's degree student, a good brother, good cook, and fun uncle for Titus & Mike. He bought the suit and wore Drew's tie for his first big job interview with an American company in Shanghai this week.

Recently Zhang Li stayed overnight. Titus got up and spent the better part of the night sleeping with Uncle Zhang on the couch!

Aa for Apple

Saturday morning four little girls and their mommies came over to play and learn English. We learned Aa for apple, counted apples, make & ate apple cake, read But No Elephants (which has a lot of apples in it) and made apple trees from construction paper and paint. Special appearance made by Sheep and Dog puppets. Window crayons were used to write on the glass sliding door, which served as our chalkboard!

Drew liked having all the little kids in the house. He said we need to do this more often.

The Happy Couple

I'm 25 now, which means I've had a crush on Drew Addington and only Drew Addington for 10 years, since I was 15. There are some perks to finding your husband when you're in high school, like all this shared history, lots of fun memories and never worrying about finding a mate before you're middle-aged...but the downside is waiting several years until you can actually get hitched, years that seem like millenniums at the time. But our married years have been a whirlwind, probably because we immediately had two babies and moved to the other side of the world. We've quickly become even better buddies and I suspect that the strength of our companionship and depth of our romance will only increase!

Anyway, I thought I'd show you some pictures of The Happy Couple since they don't often get a lot of pictures on here -- their offspring are always stealing the show.

First, two recent shots:

Now, pictures of me and my boyfrien':

notice the eye color:

Two Deaths

This sweet grandmother passed away last Monday, a shock to us all. If you remember we visited this family last month (Qiufen, the girl, is a friend) and slept in Grandmother's bed. That bed and all her personal possessions have been burned in the the Daoist funeral ritual. Qiufen and I are working on writing down Grandmother's life story.

Pan Jian is a young man who I used to visit at the orphanage. He is much smaller than Titus, but is actually 13 years old. Because of his illness, people who love him had been Asking that he would pass away; he was ready. Those close to him feel confident that he will join us in glory with a resurrected body.